Pond Speedrun Hackathon

Yongkang Zou · 2025-08-26 · hackathon · Emotion & Vision AI

Building across time zones

We just won the Future Startup Prize and a share of $50,000 in funding at the Pond Hackathon with our project EmoHunter. The crazy part is I still haven't met all my teammates in person.

I was in Paris dealing with a six-hour time difference. Jing was recovering from jet lag and a fever after her international travel. Somehow, we teamed up with three other developers back home and made it work. We took turns sleeping so there was always someone online coding, designing, or testing. It felt like a relay race where the baton was a Figma file and Git commits.

Proactive over reactive

In just five days, we built EmoHunter. It is my most technically complex app yet. The architecture strings together computer vision, voice agents, a multi-agent backend, blockchain elements, and a native Swift iOS client.

Most mental health chatbots are purely reactive. We wanted to build a proactive AI. EmoHunter connects with you via a real-time video call to offer support before your emotions completely take over.

The iOS client handles incoming proactive calls from our voice agent, Aura.

It was a sleepless ride, but I am incredibly proud of what we shipped. Big shoutout to my teammates Jing Wu, Aetos, Sky, and Yuhang.

We are not letting this stay a hackathon project. We are actively working to bring EmoHunter to the App Store so people can get help exactly when they need it. Huge thanks to Pond for organizing the event, and to our sponsors ElevenLabs, Google Cloud, and the Ethereum Foundation for their support.

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